BEING given a nickname by a Jamaican can be brutal, especially for a child who woke up one day and realised he could no longer walk and had to spend the next eight years relearning how to do so.

At just four years old Charlton McFarlane was “essentially paralysed” and spent six weeks in hospital, including 10 days in the intensive care unit. His family was told that he had Guillain–Barré syndrome.

The condition is a rare neurological disorder that comes on suddenly and increases in intensity until certain muscles cannot be used, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), which is part of the US National Institutes of Health.

So monikers like “Step Inna It”, “Hopscotch” and “Tippy” — all coined because of his gait — became dreaded nicknames for the young Charlton, so much so that he’d cry to avoid going to community shops for his mother because he didn’t want to be teased along the way.

“I would’ve been teased mercilessly by children because I had to learn how to walk again. I walked and kicked my foot, and stuff like that. Every minute my mother had to carry my pants to the tailor to patch it because I would fall often — fall on the knees — [with the] pants tearing up,” said McFarlane in a recent interview with the Jamaica Observer.

Growing up in Cockburn Pen — a fact he is very proud of because “good things come from anywhere” — the young McFarlane vowed that he would one day matter.

Now, he’s the chief executive officer of Universal Service Fund (USF), but he still has muscle issues today.

“When people see me walking now, they think it is a limp. It is the remnants of the injury…” he said.

Though he had to deal with being teased throughout preparatory and high school, he confessed to developing a knack for turning things around in his favour.

“So, tease me about ‘Step Inna It’ so mi start step inna it… From a young age I’ve been able to take things that people used to tease me, to even belittle me, and somehow, some way, find a way fi turn it cool, fi turn it into something desirable — and I think that has stayed with me,” McFarlane said.

He told the Sunday Observer that things started to change for him after completing nine Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate subjects at Kingston College.

“I got all nine subjects and is like that helped to make me more attractive to people, because all of a sudden this youth a nuh fool…” he recounted, adding, “I guess that was where I got my buss — that a weh mi step inna it.”

McFarlane reiterated that he had to matter.

“I did not want to grow up not mattering, because [with] my experiences as a youngster, yuh wouldn’t matter. Who really cares about somebody weh born to a labourer and a janitor inna the ghetto, you know what I mean?

“I wanted to matter so I needed to find something that would make me stand out and, funny enough, I became head boy [at Kingston College] so I started to matter — in my mind anyway,” he recounted.

After completing high school McFarlane set his sights on attending university, though his father encouraged him to get a job. But, having seen others around him opt to attend university part-time while working and taking an extended time to finish their degree programmes, McFarlane decided to take on three more years of “struggling” to better position himself for the future.

“Delayed gratification, I had no problem with that. I will sacrifice for a greater goal somewhere down the line, and sacrifice I did,” he told the Sunday Observer. “I signed up for a student loan and got two of my brothers to be guarantors, and I went to university.”

He described this period during his studies at The University of the West Indies (The UWI) as the “roughest time” in his life.

“I went to school many days with $40 in my pocket — bus fare was $20 go and $20 come — and I went to university. Do the maths — we nah eat.

“But it is university, so yuh link with your brethren dem [and] dem run a boat and so on, but that was my reality. And because that was my reality I told myself seh, ‘Mi nuh have time fi do four years, enuh.’ It is a three-year degree, [and] I made sure I had to finish in three years, because mi hungry — life rough,” said McFarlane.

And that he did. He completed a major in economics and a double minor in statistics and political science.

“At that time, as a young economist coming out of university, the three main places to be were BOJ [Bank of Jamaica], PIOJ [Planning Institute of Jamaica] or Statin [Statistical Institute of Jamaica], but I’ve always wanted to be different,” McFarlane explained. “In seeking a job right after university, I didn’t want to go to those entities, because I would have just gone there and be another economist.”

So, he landed a job at the Ministry of Health as a research assistant with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). It was there he met Trinidadian Dr Stanley Lalta, a health economist.

At the time, McFarlane said Lalta told him that, as far as he knew, he was the only health economist in the country. And since needing to matter was important to the young McFarlane, he set his sights on also becoming a health economist, applying to a master’s degree programme at University of York.

“I… got accepted. They sent me the cost — £8,000 in 2004… another £8,000 for accommodation; that was roughly a shade under $2 million at the time,” said McFarlane.

But, he didn’t have that kind of money to fund the next leg of his educational journey, so he applied for scholarships. However, with the start of the school year approaching, no word on a scholarship, and his employment contract with PAHO nearing its end, the young economist had to think next steps and began applying for other jobs. He landed a job teaching at Ardenne High School.

“By the middle of September I got the fateful phone call saying I got a scholarship. And me, like an idiot, when they said they would pay school fee and pay for my boarding, I wrote the letter to the financing agency to say, ‘Thank you, I cannot accept this,’” McFarlane shared, adding that he questioned how he would make his way in England without additional support.

At the time he had a brother and sister already living in England, but he said they were miles away from York and were only just making a way for themselves in that country.

“To me, is like, after going to UWI without lunch for a while I never wanted to live that again, because I had started working now [and] I started putting on weight…” an animated McFarlane told the Sunday Observer.

It was a friend who convinced him to find a way to take up the opportunity, as there was no guarantee he might receive a similar one again.

“So I wrote the letter [to the financing agency], but I didn’t send it off,” he said.

Besides it being the first time he would have been travelling overseas, McFarlane said he didn’t have the plane fare. But two people in his network assisted him and he was able to make the trip to England.

“When I got to England my sister came for me at the airport and took me grocery shopping. She bought me like a case of tea and some tea biscuits, and rice and flour and tin stuff, and gave me £100… and that was a lot because she just started working and getting on her feet [in the country],” said McFarlane.

Painting a picture of what life was like from then on, he told the Sunday Observer that his daily breakfast was a cup of tea and two of the single biscuits from a pack, because it had to last.

“I didn’t plan to go back and pressure my sister, because I know her sacrifice. I went to school, so I didn’t eat any lunch. I came home and cooked. I couldn’t knead flour… [so] I ate rice for probably six months, and it was when the rice done I knead [the] flour,” he recounted, adding that it took some time, but he eventually got it right.

He said, too, that he would attend events held at the school just to get a meal.

“Any little function at the school, I was there. They had food there and that’s why I went there — for the food,” said McFarlane.

A lover of dancehall and reggae music, he also landed gigs as a deejay, which helped him earn cash. He’d taken his case of CDs with him when he was leaving Jamaica and was approached about playing at a club, and he went for it.

“I remember one night I played in a the club for about four hours, first time deejaying. That led to somebody calling me and asking me to play, and they would give me like £20,” he recalled.

He also ensured he never left out the church, which is where he found a community.

Though he was offered a scholarship to remain in England and pursue a PhD after successfully completing his master’s degree, McFarlane returned home because “I love Jamaica”.

“I have this belief, whether it is crazy or not, that the public sector can be better than it is now — better in terms of efficiency, better in terms of customer service, better in terms of just our business processes, how we do things,” he explained.

He returned to the Ministry of Health as a health economist before landing a job as the deputy CEO at the Registrar General’s Department (RGD). A stint with the national identification system team followed, before he went back to RGD in the still-vacant deputy CEO post, before applying for the CEO position and was successful.

It was his departure from Jamaica’s sole repository of births, deaths, marriages, and foetal death records in 2024 that might have made him more widely known, as he got quite the send-off at the RGD headquarters in St Catherine on his last day — the video for which went viral.

And though his life was turned upside down within two weeks, due to what led to him stepping down as CEO, the cheering colleagues who lined the driveway on his final day, some of whom could be heard saying, “We love you, Sir” in the viral video, hit a chord with McFarlane.

“When I came out and I heard the applause… I didn’t know that I had that type of impact because that’s not something that I look for, it’s not something that I do… I was just being myself, genuine self with people,” he said.

“I didn’t cry, enuh… but I felt overwhelmed,” he told the Sunday Observer.

He had not considered it before his sit-down with this reporter but, in retrospect, McFarlane said in that moment he realised that he really mattered.

Now 42 years old, married, a father of three and the new head of USF, he is dedicated to making sure that no one around him feels left out.

“My desire to matter as a child, relative to my desire to matter now as an adult, has evolved. As a child and as a young adult, maybe in my 20s and stuff, my desire to matter at the time was more, ‘Hey, I’m important; treat me with respect.’ Now, my desire to matter is more ‘I want to matter because I make other people feel like they matter.’

“…I think I provide a living, breathing example of a youth who struggle and come through the struggle,” emphasised McFarlane.

His vision for USF is to ensure that the organisation brings digital reach, connectivity, and Internet access to every nook and cranny of Jamaica, while driving the digital transformation agenda of the Government.